Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Prey: Hell's Heart

Star Trek: Prey, Book 1: Hell's Heart
by John Jackson Miller

February 2386 / Summer 2286

Published: 2016
Acquired: April 2023
Read: March 2024

Read enough of an author's work, and you begin to notice what interests them, their recurrent themes and obsessions. LibraryThing tells me I own twenty-six books with contributions by John Jackson Miller, of which I have read seventeen, from 2006's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic to 2023's Strange New Worlds: The High Country. As a writer, Miller is often interest in cons and grifts, hoodwinking other, misdirections, sleights of hand, these are all things his villains love to do, but also his protagonists. This is so blatant that in the KOTOR comics he has a grifter actually named "Gryph"! There's a lot of illusion and trickery especially in his novel Picard: Rogue Elements, but a fair bit too in the long con of The High Country. (You can see why they got him to write a Section 31–themed Discovery novel, though I didn't read that one)

Book 1 of Prey is all about a long con, one of the longest cons of all. The Enterprise-E is summoned to help transport various members of the House of Kruge to a ceremony to honor them, in order to set up the House's participation in a vital negotiation between the Khitomer and Typhon powers. The House of Kruge has been leaderless since the events of The Search for Spock a century ago, no squabbling family member able to achieve dominance over another. But when the ceremony comes under attack, it turns out that there's an agenda a work, one that's been in action for a full century!

John Jackson Miller has a good grasp of character voices, but the problem with a novel about a con being run on our heroes is that they largely spend it reactive—and for the most part, the reader is ahead of them. It's pretty obvious that Galdor, gin'tak of House Kruge, is up to something and in league with the assassins who attack the summit even before this is explicitly revealed, but it's something our heroes still don't know after 383 pages. This is a long time to read about main characters who continually react to crisis after crisis, making no headway in understanding what's going on. Like his writer, Galdor is moving all the pieces into position for a dramatic payoff in future installments... but that doesn't necessarily make for riveting reading on its own. (And, unfortunately, as can often be the case with stories of deception, who Galdor was pretending to be was kind of more interesting than who he turned out to actually be.)

Like with Takedown, I felt that Miller handled the screen characters well in the sense of capturing their voices, but less so in the sense that it doesn't really feel like the book matters to them. This is even true with Worf, to whom the events of the book ought to matter a lot. What's at stake for his character? Kahless, I guess? Honor? But these stakes come across as more hypothetical than actual. The nonscreen characters, though, are there in name only, if at all. (Though, it's not Miller's fault if Šmrhová doesn't have a personality.) The previous Next Generation novel, Armageddon's Arrow, did a good job of giving the Enterprise crew little bits and bobs, but this pulls back from that, much as it also pulls back from the Enterprise's suppose renewed mission of exploration yet again.

Don't get me wrong, there are a couple good twists, and some strong action. But I wanted Picard, Riker, La Forge, and so on to do something interesting and clever, to figure something out. Hopefully that's what books 2 and 3 are for.

Continuity Notes:

• It feels like a weird thing to complain that I wanted more continuity references in a book that manages to tie the events of Search for Spock to those of DS9's "Captive Pursuit," but I thought it was weird how vague the references to Insurrection were given this takes the Enterprise back to its setting. Picard never thinks, "Oh Anij who I claimed to want to spend hundreds of days with is close by" or anything like that.

Other Notes:

• There's an extended flashback in the middle to the Enterprise-A bumping into the "Unsung" Klingons. I felt like this went on a bit, and again, it seemed like there should be more character stuff at stake, especially for Kirk. Meeting a group of discommoded Klingons who refuses to do anything at all as their ships drift to their doom seems like a good Star Trek Adventures scenario, I'll have to remember that.
  
• When Cross was unmasked, I immediately thought, "Oh, it's The Wizard of Oz." One page later, Cross is quoting the movie and calling its title character a hero. Korgh thinks that he "rather doubted the hero of any children's story would appreciate the worship of a man who had helped engineer the decapitation of one of the great houses of the Klingon Empire." Korgh needs to read The Land of Oz, where we learn the Wizard was willing to hand an innocent baby off to a wicked witch in order to guarantee his own power, ending a royal line.
  
• Cross is a nice lively character among the often dour, honor-obsessed Klingon cast. I hope we get a good amount more from him in books 2 and 3.
• I don't feel that Martok came across as very well; he has to be a bit of a dunce for things to work.
  
• Today I learned that it's spelled "painstik" for some reason.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Prey: The Jackal's Trick by John Jackson Miller

Hugos 2024: Unraveller by Frances Hardinge

Unraveller by Frances Hardinge

Frances Hardinge is a UK writer who writes young adult fantasy; I first discovered her when my friend Victoria Ford Smith recommended her novel The Lie Tree, since it was about that favorite subject of mine, Victorian science. (I in turn recommended this to my friend Christiana Salah to teach in her British literature class, and she reported it was her students' favorite of the readings she assigned.) I liked The Lie Tree enough that I've since bought any of Hardinge's books that become Lodestar finalists; this is the third, after A Skinful of Shadows and Deeplight.

Originally published: 2022
Acquired: April 2024
Read: May 2024

Reading the finalists for the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book often makes me despair. Does the genre of young adult sf&f have to be so, well, generic? Saying Hardinge "transcends" genre is condescending, but she does refuse to be hemmed in by it, I think. Unraveller is squarely YA, in that it's about young people coming into adulthood and learning to navigate that, but it's not the currently overly common YA narrative of villages getting attacked and people going on quests, which are clearly written by writers who have watched a lot of Avatar: The Last Airbender but not read many actual books. (Though if that's what the market wants, can we blame them?)

Anyway, Unraveller is set in a fantasy world where a sufficiently angry person can incubate inside themselves a "curse egg," which then allows them to hit the target of their anger with a curse—usually a thematically appropriate but disproportionate punishment. If, for example (minor spoiler here), you are a boat inspector who goes around fining people for illegal fishing, maybe you get transformed into bait for the hook of a fisherman. One of the two main characters has the talent of "unravelling"; he can follow the threads of a curse and unravel it, which usually required him to emotionally understand the curser and set things right. The other main character is a girl who he uncursed; she was transformed into a bird... and still sometimes finds herself yearning for that way of being.

So, as I am coming to realize is typical of Hardinge, we have an interesting secondary world but also a set of concepts that are thematically rich. No one would ever be tempted to use the term "magic system" to describe this book. There are a lot of really great sequences in this novel, as the two protagonists travel from place to place, unravelling curses, but also slowly realizing that there's a conspiracy they need to unravel too, a plot to leverage the power of cursers in a systematic way. Hardinge is an evocative writer, and her dark landscapes throb with life.

Compared to the previous Hardinge novels I've read, I would rate this below The Lie Tree and A Skinful of Shadows but above Deeplight. Though I liked a lot about this novel, I felt like its ambition somewhat outreached its grasp. There were a rich set of associations here, but by the novel's end, I didn't think they'd totally cohered. The metaphorical associations resonating in Unraveller's conception of cursing didn't pay off in the plot about the conspiracy. In our era of populist leaders leveraging anger to dark purposes, it seemed to me that there was some potential in how the conspirators were taking people's curses and misdirecting their anger to fulfill their own ambitions, but this wasn't really present in the text. I also found the conspiracy plot a bit jerky in the way it unfolded.

But, you know, give me a flawed Frances Hardinge novel over a successful A:TLA ripoff any day. So many of those books are completely forgettable; this book contains images I will remember for a long time.

Library of America: The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett / The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson

American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956: The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth / More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon / The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett / The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson
edited by Gary K. Wolfe

The last two novels in this Library of America edition are The Long Tomorrow (1955) by Leigh Brackett and The Shrinking Man (1956) by Richard Matheson. The former was, as far as I know, my first experience of the work of Leigh Brackett, a pioneering author of her era; The Long Tomorrow was a finalist for the 1965 Hugo Award for Best Novel, but lost out to Heinlein's Double Star (1956). I've read a few pieces by Matheson, including his 1975 novel Somewhere in Time.

Collection published: 2012
Novels originally published: 1955-56
Acquired: July 2023
Read: March 2024

What strikes me reading and writing them up together is that they are both concerned with what it means to be a man. The Long Tomorrow is a bildungsroman set in a postapocalyptic United States. It's not a novel of nuclear fallout or anything; what the novel focuses on is the fact that the U.S. government banned the establishment of communities of a certain size. No more cities, no more large buildings. This slows down technological redevelopment and prevents the creation of large targets for enemy nations. The main character is a boy, later young man, from an Amish-adjacent community in rural Ohio, who struggles as he runs up against the stipulations of his family and his village. Eventually, he goes on the run, traveling to a city on the Ohio River and then further west, in search of a mythical place where people can build cities and develop advanced technology once more.

The big conflict of the novel, though, is internal. How do you decide what values to adhere to, and what ones to ignore? Especially when these values seem to boil down to a form of fanaticism? But... what is there to replace them with other than a different form of fanaticism? I am a sucker for a good bildungsroman, and this is an excellent one, my favorite of the four novels collected in this volume. Lots of acutely observed, painful human psychology wedded to strong worldbuilding and atmospheric prose. I do really like Double Star, but if this had won the Hugo, I would have been quite pleased too.

But if The Long Tomorrow is a bildungsroman, the novel of the making of a man, then The Shrinking Man is the opposite—the novel of the unmaking of a man. I had thought going in from the cheesy title of the film based on the book (The Incredible Shrinking Man, which admittedly I have not seen) that this would be a cheesy story... but actually the title is very clever. Yes, the novel is about a shrinking man, but more specifically, it is about a shrinking man. As the protagonist shrinks, he loses his sense of masculinity and thus his sense of self, he diminishes in terms of being able to think of himself as a person who can do the kind of things men are supposed to be able to do: to provide for women and to desire and be desired by women, to exert physical authority over others. I can't say I loved this novel—Matheson takes you through his diminishment in a very methodical way that sometimes becomes plodding—but it was considerably more interesting than I expected it to be, and it paired nicely with The Long Tomorrow.

As a man can be built up by figuring out what he values, so too can he be torn down by having what he values taken away. Both of these novels showcase the ability of science fiction to defamiliarize the familiar, to get the reader to reconsider how their world operates by presenting a different one.

Let's Dance!

When Child One was younger, they wanted to be a cheerleader. I think this is because they would see the cheerleaders practice in the mall area at my wife's high school. But when you are three, there are not really cheerleading classes you can sign up for, so we signed them up for gymnastics at the Y, since this would let them practice the skills they could later use in cheerleading.

One day, though (as I remember it), they saw all the girls go by in their tutus on the way to dance class. "I want to do that," they said. So we switched them to dance class. (This would be when they were around 4½.) We put them in the 4-6 class, but after one session, the teacher suggested bumping them down to the 3-year-old class because their coordination skills weren't quite there yet.

May 2023 recital

They did dance class for several months, culminating in the May 2023 recital, where their class danced to the song from the "Enchanted Tiki Room" at Disney. (They do a big recital, where all the kids from all the dance classes at the Y show off, from age 2 up to age 17.) I would not say Child One is an extraordinary dancer, but as the lone four-year-old in a class of three-year-olds, they were the best at sticking to their routine in front of a large audience! At the end of the recital, all the dancers get a rose from their teacher, which they really treasured. They were also very into the bow tie they got to wear.

Unfortunately, we had to pull them out of dance shortly after that, because summer travel meant we were going to miss more dance classes than we were going to make. We intended to put them back into class once things calmed down, but once they were out, they insisted they didn't want to do it anymore! Often, they like things to be a certain way.

But then in October, they were digging through stuff in their room and found the rose. "When am I going to get another rose?" they asked. "Well," I said, "never if you're not in dance class." So they demanded I sign them back up! There wasn't room in the class, actually, but the dance instructor let them overenroll. (She's great, I really like her. She has been teaching dance at our YMCA for over twenty years!)

May 2024 recital

So this May, their second recital rolled around. Now in the 4-6 class, they did the title song from The Beauty and the Beast; they were the Beast, while all the girls in the class were Belle. They got a vest with gold buttons to supplement their bow tie, which they were very into. And they racked up another rose! Again, the class was very nervous in front of our large audience, but Child One held their own. It was definitely a proud dad moment watching them up there in front of all these other kids. 

Hopefully this time they don't drop out for six months!

The Cosmere by Brandon Sanderson: Elantris

Elantris: Tenth Anniversary Author's Definitive Edition

by Brandon Sanderson

This is my fifth Cosmere novel, but Brandon Sanderson's first. I read Warbreaker first, and you can definitely see how Warbreaker is a rewriting of this: a city of gods who don't do anything, a princess in an arranged marriage arrives in a foreign city, the man she was to marry isn't what she thought, the princess recruits disaffected merchants to her cause in one-on-one meetings.

Edition published: 2015
Originally published: 2005
Acquired: March 2021
Read: November 2023

I liked Warbreaker better. The chapters here about the prince and the princess are okay, if plodding. (More on that in a bit.) But the chapters about the religious fanatic dude were interminably dull. You would think a Mormon would be able to write a religious fanatic with more nuance.

I think the big problem I am having with Brandon Sanderson novels is that they all feel very... incremental. A tiny bit of progress is made in each section, again and again and again. There are very rarely any big moments that seize you, it's just a very slow very steady climb to the end. There are things that should be big on the way, but something about the way he writes mean they never feel big; he doesn't seem to know how make the energy of the novel ebb and flow in a way that propels the reader forward. It's just plod plod plod until you get to the end—which as always is a totally uninteresting reveal about the magic system. Wow, the prince guy figured out how to write magic words! This is the kind of thing that in Le Guin would be the thematic, emotional, and character lynchpin of the novel... but here it's just a thing that explains all the elements of the "magic system" you never wanted explained to begin with.

Every nine months I read another novel of the Cosmere. Next up in sequence: Mistborn: The Alloy of Law

Temeraire by Naomi Novik, Book 4: Empire of Ivory

Empire of Ivory: Book Four of Temeraire
by Naomi Novik

Empire of Ivory begins right after the conclusion of Black Powder War, with Temeraire and his crew making it back to Britain and finding out why Britain's dragons did not come to the aid of Europe as Napoleon's forces overran the continent: a deadly sickness has spread among the dragons, incapacitating most of them.

Originally published: 2007
Acquired and read: January 2024

Without giving too much away, it turns out that Temeraire is immune to the sickness, probably as a result of something that happened to him in Africa on his long sea voyage from Britain to China in Throne of Jade. Thus, reluctantly, Will Laurence, Temeraire, and a group of sick dragons must set out for Cape Town to see if they can recover and reproduce whatever it was that made Temeraire immune.

Unfortunately, though there are lots of good moments of characterization and worldbuilding throughout the book, what results was to my mind the dullest of the Temeraire books thus far. I had a grad school professor who use to talk about the "paradox of tedium": how did you communicate the tediousness of work in your novel without the book itself becoming tedious? But if you didn't make the book itself tedious, then you failed to capture the emotional experience your book was supposedly about. I don't know if that quite applies to Empire of Ivory, but too much of the book is spent in a state of stasis, waiting to see if something works again and again and again, without much to pull the reader along. We do eventually get some more interest and complexity, and the book ends up delving into the role of dragons in (an) African society. There's some good stuff here, though the book doesn't go into as much depth as Throne of Jade did with China, and more tantalizes than spells out. It ends up feeling like a sideshow from the main plot rather than central to it.

That said, the last couple chapters were brilliant. As I am coming to realize is often the case with Novik's work, all the pieces have been carefully put into position to create a climax, and even when the positioning isn't intrinsically interesting, the climax is still highly effective. I may have found Empire of Ivory a weaker book (which isn't to say it's a bad one), but it still left me eagerly anticipating the next installment. How are they going to get out of this one?

Every ten months I read an installment of Temeraire. Next up in sequence: Victory of Eagles

The Summer of the Book?

Back in 2021, I wrote a "book revision progress report," outlining how many chapters of my eternally-in-progress monograph had been completed and how many I needed to go. These are my chapters:

1. Frankenstein
2. Wives and Daughters
3. medical reform novels
4. domestic fiction
5. air-war novels
6. novels of biocracy
7. professionalized scientists

Plus an introduction and a coda; I'm not revising in order, so as of that point, I had finished revising chapters 2, 4, 3, and (almost) 6.

Where do I stand now?

CHAPTER 1
I had been doing a pretty good job of getting out a chapter every summer. But something happened (I don't remember what), and I just was not able to finish a chapter Summer 2022; I got partway through this chapter and stalled out. But thankfully I came back to it Summer 2023 and got it done, and I am actually very happy with it now. It's hard to say something original about Frankenstein, but I believe I have, and the chapter has a clearer purpose in my project. Finished Summer 2023.

CHAPTER 7
This chapter was originally a hodgepodge. It is made up on analyses of three novels: George Gissing's Born in Exile, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, and H. G. Wells's Ann Veronica. Only originally, the discussions of Born in Exile and Ann Veronica had been part of chapter 4, and the discussion of The Secret Agent chapter 5/6 (which was then one chapter about revolution/future war). Back when this was my dissertation, it was pretty late in the day that I hived these three texts off into their own chapter, and there was no overall throughline, and there was literally no engagement with previous scholarship about the professionalization of science.

So this one needed a lot of work, in terms of tracking down sources and arranging things so that it actually made a point. I finished the bulk of the research and rewrote the Born in Exile portion Summer 2023, and then across the course of the school year worked slowly but steadily on the Secret Agent portion, finishing that up right after the school year ended in early May. My goal for early summer, then, is to revise the Ann Veronica part, and this seems quite doable. Should Finish Summer 2024.

CHAPTER 5
This is the thus the only chapter I haven't touched since grad school, but the chapter is based on an article I published in Science Fiction Studies and thus in fairly good shape, I would guess. My main thing would be seeing if there's anything from the last eight or so years that I need to accommodate or incorporate there. It's hard for me to imagine it will take me long to revise this. Should Finish Summer 2024.

That leaves revising the introduction and also going through the project in its complete form to make sure it's coherent, that ideas I came upon at one point are reflected throughout the project and referred to consistently. (I am a bit worried that the way I used Daston and Galison's terminology from Objectivity in some early chapters is not consistent with how it got used in some later chapters; I think I introduced a set of terms I really like from Robert Kargon about halfway through the book, but they really should be there from chapter 2 onward.) I reread the intro earlier this year and found it a bit stiff, but I think it can be made to work; basically like a lot of work produced by graduate students, it comes across as a little defensive, and I don't think it needs to be.

I also keep toying with a coda, but I think I will do it; I have a pretty straightforward idea.

So could 2024 be the summer of the book? I think so, but it will require some pretty deliberate focus on my part. Once the kids get out of school, things always get tricky around here!

Hopefully the editor that expressed interest before there was a pandemic and I had two kids is still alive.

Doctor Who: The Quality of Leadership by Keith R.A. DeCandido (ed.)

Doctor Who: Short Trips #24: The Quality Of Leadership
edited by Keith R A DeCandido
based on a concept by John S. Drew

I bought this direct from the editor at a convention back in July 2008. A few months later, I think he asked me on LiveJournal when I was going to review it—early reviews being very helpful to the early sales of books. I told him I would read it when I got to it on my reading list, and he seemed a bit peeved.

Published: 2008
Acquired: July 2008
Read: March 2024

He was probably right to be peeved, as it's over fifteen years later, and my review cannot be of any use to him, as the book is long out-of-print. But anyway, I've finally got to it. The book is an unusual Short Trips installment, as editor Keith R.A. DeCandido is American, and thus has a different set of contacts than your usual Short Trips editor, many culled from the world of Star Trek tie-in fiction; you will not find your obligatory Justin Richards or Stephen Cole story here. Instead the volume features Star Trek novel luminaries Peter David and Diane Duane, and also a lot of people who worked with Keith on the Corps of Engineers ebooks, like Terri Osborne and Richard C. White. It even features the first Doctor Who fiction of Una McCormack, who would later become a prolific contributor to the Doctor Who audio and novel lines.

The anthology has an interesting premise, of the Doctor's encounters with various leaders, but the way the premise is implemented makes it less effective than it could be. The anthology has a frame story, about a dying ruler of an alien world who met the Doctor at the beginning of his reign; the Doctor told him stories about leadership to inspire him. Unfortunately, though there are many stories here about leaders, few seem to have anything to do with leadership. The very first one he tells, for example, Peter David's "One Fateful Knight," is supposedly about King Arthur... but it's more a story that King Arthur is in than a story about King Arthur. Mostly it's a pretty poorly thought out prequel/sequel to Battlefield, which is one of my favorite seventh Doctor tv stories, and which this tie-in totally fails to get. It does have a couple okay jokes, but it's a big misfire to lead off with.

Other stories seem to have similar problems: the Doctor's companion Romana replaces Boudica in "Good Queen, Bad Queen, I Queen, You Queen," but the complications of this, the leadership lessons of this, seem largely skipped over. Like, could the original Romana really replace a warrior queen? I think we need more than we get here. Plus there's a wacky twist I did not see the point of. Along those lines, I felt we got little of King Theodoric's leadership in Diane Duane's "Goths and Robbers" (though she does good Tegan) or Martin Luther's in Richard White's "The Price of Conviction" or King Henry VIII's in Linnea Dodson's "God Send Me Well to Keep." These stories weren't bad, but I couldn't imagine the Doctor choosing to tell them to inspire a young prince to greatness. 

One of only a few to really hit the theme right was Kathleen O. David's "On a Pedestal," where the Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria meet William Wallace (the Braveheart guy), though bits of it were pretty rushed. Some didn't fit the theme terribly well but got away with it; I'm not convinced that Plato counts as a "leader," but Allyn Gibson's "The Spindle of Necessity" is an interestingly written story with a good grasp of the sixth Doctor's voice and a neat conclusion, so who cares.

You might imagine the premise lends itself to "historicals," and you'd be right. Mostly this is fine, but many of them have to contrive reasons for the Doctor to be there, and they don't always convince. There are just three stories about fictional leaders; two are really tedious sci-fi tales where I wasn't even sure who the "leader" character was supposed to be.

One, though, was my favorite story in the book, James Swallow's "Clean-up on Aisle Two," about a night manager at a 24/7 market. More than any other story in the book, it actually has something to say about leadership, plus it has a strong sense of voice and a well-characterized seventh Doctor. (Several of the stories in the book suffer, I think, from being written by Americans trying to do British.) In moving away from an actual leader, it seemed to me that Swallow was the one who came the closest to what I thought the book was actually going to be about.

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: I, the Constable

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: I, the Constable
by Paula M. Block & Terry J. Erdmann

supposedly 2385, but after The Long Mirage

"But the sun seldom shines above Bowog Bog."

Published: 2017
Acquired: May 2022
Read: March 2024

This brings the Block/Erdmann Quark trilogy to a close, though this one has a stronger focus on Odo, especially at first. Quark learns that an uncle of his is dead and he might inherit... except Rom recently made it legal for wives to inherit, and his uncle has three! So Quark goes to Ferenginar to try to woo them, but disappears; Odo, at a loose end waiting for Federation bureaucracy to resolve the issue of the Dominion refugees following the events of The Long Mirage, reluctantly volunteers to go to Ferenginar and find Quark.

It's fun enough, probably my favorite of the three of these enovellas. The humor is a bit broad and sometimes overegged (there's a joke about Rom wearing a hat that's laid on way too thick), but I think the Ferengi work best when there's some kind of cultural contrast, and it's more entertaining to read about Odo trying to navigate Ferengi society than Quark trying to navigate it. Block and Erdmann have a strong grasp of Odo's voice, and enjoy seeing him in the familiar role of investigator, instead of the wishy-washy ex-Dominion leader he is in George's stories. I wish the mystery was more of a genuine mystery; once Quark reenters the story, things get a bit less interesting.

But it's fun to see Odo encounter different aspects of Ferengi culture. We get to meet a Ferengi homicide investigator—and we learn there's so little violent crime on Ferenginar they have just one guy who investigates it and he still doesn't have much to do! This is opposed to the huge Ferengi Commerce Authority devoted to combating financial crime. I zipped through it (hard not to, it's so short), and I had a good enough time.

Grand Nagus Gint

Continuity Notes:

• Some of these DS9 enovellas have slotted into their timeline slots kind of awkwardly, but this one picks up from the end of The Long Mirage fairly well; the status quo for all the characters is pretty much as David R. George III left it.
• Quark insists the Rules of Acquisition can't be amended and haven't been for 10,000 years, but on-screen evidence indicates this is not correct; we know from Enterprise that there were fewer rules in the twenty-second century than there are in the twenty-fourth.
  
• Rom designs a communication device and Odo shifts his own comm badge to match the new design. I don't really buy that Odo can successfully imitate comm badge components on the molecular level, but I think my preferred explanation (Odo pins a real comm badge to himself) probably doesn't hold up either.
• Rom also gets excited that he "actually invented something." What about those self-replicating mines?

Other Notes:

• There's a character here named "Quirk"; we learn that both "Quirk" and "Quark" are derived from the "same Ferengi word for 'splattered mud,' but different regions have different mud..."
• "Everybody makes jokes about the 113th Rule: 'Always have sex with the boss.'" Including Quark himself, in Legends of the Ferengi.
• Never thought I would read a clear Virginia Woolf reference in a Quark comedy story.
• Okay, but surely someone ought to say, "Forget it Quark, it's Ferenginar," at some point?
  

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Prey: Hell's Heart by John Jackson Miller

Technologies of Immortality: Course Assignments and Critical Texts

With this post, I wanted to talk a bit more about my immortality-focused team-taught Honors course. Specifically, I want to talk about two readings that I assigned that were not science fiction, but rather about it. (My previous post about the precise stories we assigned may be of use.)

For Honors students here at UT, these "Dialectics" courses replace their usual general education requirements. Thus it was important to me that I just not assign literature, but also that I assign something about fiction, to expose the students to literary criticism. I ended up deciding that the two most useful pieces would be two pieces that have been influential on my understanding of science fiction, though neither is a traditional work of literary criticism. I paired each one with one of our groups of sf texts and thus one of our assignments.

Isaac Asimov: "Social Science Fiction"

I've posted here in the past about Isaac Asimov's three-part typology of science fiction: adventure-dominant, technology-dominant, and sociology-dominant. These he articulated in his introductions to the 1962 anthologies Soviet Science Fiction and More Soviet Science Fiction. What I only recently learned (thanks to a query on Reddit) is that he originally discussed the three types of sf in somewhat different terms in a 1952 essay called "Social Science Fiction"; I don't know why this essay wasn't reprinted in Asimov on Science Fiction along with the two Soviet ones, but it has been reprinted a number of other places, including Damon Knight's 1977 anthology Turning Points: Essays on the Art of Science Fiction.

In this essay, he calls the three categories "adventure," "gadget," and "social," and I like how he articulates the differences through a series of examples about how you'd write a story about the automobile if it was sf. An adventure story about the car would use it in a thrilling chase, a gadget story about the car would focus on how internal combustion engines work in exhaustive detail, and a social story about the car would have it already having been invented and focus on the question of "what do we do about automobile accidents? Men, women, and children are being killed by automobiles faster than by artillery shells or airplane bombs. What can be done?" (41).

As you might guess from the essay's title, he's mostly concerned with what social science fiction is and how it works, giving definitions and examples. It's got its weird parts (there's a long digression about the "chess game" of history I don't care for at all) but overall it's a strong definition of sf that gives student writers a lot to work with. I particularly like his statement, "It is easy to predict an automobile in 1880; it is very hard to predict a traffic problem" (41). What social sf tries to do, though, is predict those traffic problems.

Social Science Fiction Paper

What my first paper assignment for the students asked, then, is that they look at one or two stories from the course and think about how it was exploring what you might called the "traffic problem" of immortality. It's easy to predict cryonics, consciousness uploading, or genetic life extension in the 2020s; what's harder to predict is what the implications for society are. They could look at one story in detail, or they could compare two; they could explicitly bring in Asimov if they wanted, or an essay from the MIT Technology Review we had assigned about genetic life extension. (I also said they could cite some stuff I had referred to in class and linked to on Canvas, but not assigned as reading: a New York Times article about cryonics, an MIT Technology Review article about mind uploading, a Jo Walton blog post about "incluing," an essay by Patrick Parrinder about scientists in sf, and some other stuff.)

Here's the prompt:

Overall I was happy with how these came out. Lots of good insights and connections. Perhaps most extraordinarily, the texts the students selected were basically evenly balanced! If you are a writing instructor, you will know how rarely this happens when you give options; everyone will gravitate towards one or two texts. But in this case, every text was chosen by several students.

Grading sixty four-page papers isn't great, especially when you're also teaching two sections of a writing course, but I was able to make it work by just stretching the grading out across an entire month.

China Miéville: "Science, Fiction and Science Fiction"

I find the Asimov piece very useful as a teacher and a thinker—I even cite it in my never-complete book. But it represents a view of sf I don't totally agree with, and in the essay, even Asimov admits it's not quite the full picture, as he struggles to place Ray Bradbury in any of his three categories. So it was important to me that we also talk about how I primarily view science fiction, what I sometimes think of as the doubling effect. This is described really well by China Miéville in his introduction to H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon, and I'm forever quoting it to people.

Basically, Miéville's argument is that sf uses "rationalized alienation" to present other worlds to the reader: this isn't the world you live in, but it's different along rational lines. However, sf isn't really about science or the future, no matter what some people (like Asimov) might say. It's about now, using metaphors.

This is definitely true of a lot of the works we read in this course. Is Will McIntosh's "Bridesicle" about a possible future for cryonics? Sure. But it's really about now, about how men treat women as lifeless bodies that solely exist for their own pleasure... even when their intentions are ostensibly good! Is José Pablo Iriarte's "Proof by Induction" about a technology that lets us access the memories of the deceased? Sure. But it's really about now, about how we're unable to let go of the dead even when that's the healthy thing for us to do. Is Ren Qing's "Resurrection" about a soldier brought back to life? Sure. But it's really about now, about how you might be "dead," but it doesn't matter, the government needs you to go back out to the front line. Each of these sf stories takes a metaphor and makes it literal.

Nicely, Sam "qntm" Hughes made this point about his own story "Lena," one of the ones I assigned: 

Quite a lot of science fiction isn't about what it's about.

"Lena" is about uploading, but uploading isn't real. It doesn't exist.

...

The reason "Lena" is a concerning story isn't that one day we may be able to upload one another and when that happens we will do terrible things to those uploads. This isn't a discussion about what if, about whether an upload is a human being or should have rights. (I want to be abundantly clear: within the fictional context of "Lena", uploads definitely are human beings, and therefore automatically, inalienably, have rights.) This is about appetites which, as we are all uncomfortably aware, already exist within human nature. Upload technology is not the last missing piece of this.

Miéville argues that the appeal is that it's not just metaphor, you get the metaphor but also the literal truth. As he says of Gulliver's Travels, "Gulliver's journey to Brobdingnag... clearly casts a remorseless light on Swift's own society; it also, however, features a sword fight with a giant wasp, a passage the enjoyment of which depends on the specific uncanny/​estranging impact of literalizing the impossible: simply, it is a great, weird idea. Weirdness is good to think with, and is also its own end" (xviii). If it was just metaphor, you wouldn't get the sword fight, and that's what makes the story awesome!

This was particularly why I assigned Joe Haldeman's "Four Short Novels," which I think has absolutely no value if you think of sf in an Asimovian sense; he doesn't want to tell us anything about what the year 3001 might be like. Rather, he wants us to reflect on the society we live in now—it's a purely Miévillian piece of sf. 

Final Reflective Paper

I did want there to some kind of writing assignment tied to the readings from the last two weeks of class; I also wanted there to be an assignment that explicitly brought together the different strands of the course, which we didn't otherwise have. But this had to be manageable for both the students and for me. They were doing big group research papers for Cragun, and I would have less than a week to grade whatever I assigned, so it couldn't be a big paper.

I ended up assigning a 1½-page paper that only had to be three paragraphs long. My thought was that the paper would have to be about just one story from the second half of the course, and that it would have to make one concrete, specific connection to something from the sociology or science components of the course.

Here's the prompt:

I'm only halfway through reading these as I write this up back on May 3rd, but overall I am enjoying them so far. They're easy reads, easy to grade, and the students are making solid connections.

Unlike the previous paper, though, there's a clear clustering: a huge plurality of papers about Paolo Bacigalupi's "Pop Squad," tying it to something Professor Cragun taught them about overpopulation. The runner up is Orson Scott Card's "Skipping Stones" and income inequality.

But even in just half the submissions, every story has been represented once. A few about Haldeman's "Four Short Novels," a couple about "Lena," one about Greg Egan's "Border Guards" and religion, and one about Ken Liu's "Staying Behind" and religion. And some of the angles on "Pop Squad" have been unique; in particular, I got a couple good papers about aspects of gender I hadn't thought about. Additionally, I was worried about the students only picking sociology as the thing to connect to, but I did thus far get a couple about science: one about how what they learned about neurons is oversimplified in "Staying Behind" and "The Gods Have Not Died in Vain" and another about the issues of preserving bodies in liquid nitrogen, which was briefly mentioned in "Four Short Novels."

No one is directly citing Asimov or Miéville, but most are clearly thinking about their sociological issue in either an Asimovian or Miévillian sense, either arguing these stories show us something about the future, or that they show us something about our own society through the lens of sf.

As is often the case in teaching, I don't know if they had fun, but I did, and that's what matters to me.